Nokia to skip CES, focusing on MWC 2013 instead

Nokia chose the CES 2012 tech extravaganza to announce the then-flagship Lumia 900, but there won't be a repeat performance in 2013 as the company has decided to skip next month's Las Vegas showpiece altogether.

It will instead focus its efforts on making a splash at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, hopefully giving us a glimpse of the next wave of Windows Phone hardware it has up its sleeve for the spring and summer.

Chinese site WPDang is claiming the credit for surfacing the news, but in truth it's no real surprise. The decision to launch the Lumia 900 at this year's CES was an odd one, and in retrospect probably a mistake.

Coming just three months after Nokia showed off the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 at Nokia World, it killed what little demand there was for the latter duo long before going on sale itself. And the hoped-for uptick in Nokia's US fortunes never materialised.

And what would Nokia have to show off at CES 2013 anyway? The Lumia 820 and Lumia 920 have only just launched, as has Windows Phone 8, and unlike last year there's no even higher-end device waiting in the wings.

Yes, there's been noise about Windows Phone 7.8 and low-end offerings such as the Lumia 510, plus the rumoured big-screened Juggernaut Semaphore, but neither is a premium device worth making a big song and dance about at CES.

MWC is a far better fit for that sort of thing, though sadly we're not expecting Nokia to surprise us all over again by pulling another surprise like the 808 PureView from its bag of MWC tricks next year.